


any time you want

by evewithanapple



Category: Girls Like Girls - Hayley Kiyoko (Music Video)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-11 00:56:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4414835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coley knows where she's going.</p>
            </blockquote>





	any time you want

Every afternoon, Coley twists her way through the streets of her subdivision on her bicycle, bumping up against one-way streets and cul-de-sacs as she goes. She’s done it so many times that she can anticipate every crack and fault line in the pavement, every section where tarmac turns to loose gravel, every house where a curtain twitches as she passes by. It’s a skill honed with years of practice: on first glance, all of the well-kept laws and tidy flowerbeds look the same, and it’s easy to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going.

Coley knows where she’s going.

She traverses the subdivision because she’s forbidden from going further- her mother’s warned her off crossing to the other side of the highway, describing it as “not a nice place” (Coley understands “not nice” with the attendant wrinkling of her mother’s nose as a euphemism for “poor”) and there’s nowhere else to go. Sometimes she rides her bike to the other edge of the subdivision, where the baseball diamond drops off in a cliff face overlooking the nearest big city. At night, it’s laid out like a map, twinkling lights marking out all the places she’ll go someday: all the people she’ll meet, the person she’ll be when she turns eighteen and makes it out on her own.

Of course, her most frequent destination is Sonya’s house. Almost as long as they’ve known each other, both of her parents have been professionals (professional what, she doesn’t know; she doesn’t think Sonya does either) who take month-long business trips at the same time, so Sonya and her friends are left with the run of the house. The rules at Sonya’s house are simple: do what you want, but don’t do anything that might inspire the neighbours to call the police, because then the police might call her parents home from their trip. Coley has no problem with this. She doesn’t want to spray-paint graffiti onto the mailbox, or play ding-dong-ditch, or whatever other minor acts of delinquency that have been deemed entryway points into coolness. She’s not interested in drinking beer or putting tabs of ecstasy on her tongue. She just wants to lie on Sonya’s bed next to her, listening to her steady breathing while Coley’s own heart thumps out painful uncertainty.

Sonya’s always been a fixed point: if Coley is twitching with restless energy, ready to cut and run, Sonya is perfectly positioned in place, fitting into her surroundings like she was designed for it. Strutting down the hallway at school, tossing her hair and smiling bright white when men call at them from passing cars, swallowing straight whiskey without the slightest cough: she’s like a dream, too perfect and put-together to be real. Girls like Coley and girls like Sonya were built from different molds: one gangly and ill-fitting, one smooth and perfect, without the slightest dent or flaw.

There might have been a time, once, when Coley resented her for it, but it’s long since faded into the distance. It was followed by a period of envy, where she wanted to _be_ Sonya: wanted her poise, wanted her grace, wanted her clever, easy navigational skills. Wanted the smoothness of her legs, the muscles that stand out on her stomach, the delicate curve of her neck. But that passed too.

Now she just _wants_.

* * *

“Do you think it’s too much?” Sonya asks, frowning into her bedroom mirror. Theoretically, they were meant to leave fifteen minutes ago; the boys (a loose collective from the grade above them, suddenly interested in them- or in Sonya- since they gained curves and later curfews) invited them out to the baseball diamond to watch them play, and of course they said yes because that’s what you do when older boys invite you somewhere, but there’s been delay after delay. Their friend Elise brought over a bag bulging with makeup, and another bag bulging with weed, and she and Mia are lying on the carpet, passing a joint back and forth. Meanwhile, Sonya’s still fussing with her appearance. She spent nearly twenty minutes on her makeup (Coley could have told her it was pointless- that she looks gorgeous no matter what shade of lip gloss she puts on- but she’s in no hurry to leave, so she doesn’t) and now that that’s done, she’s fussing with her outfit, shorts and a backless halter top. She lifts one of the strings between her fingers, then lets it fall. “I mean, do I look slutty?”

“Who cares?” Mia says from the floor with a giggle. Her eyes are glazed over. “You _should_ look slutty.”

“You look fine,” Coley says, because the one thing she wants to do less than go to the baseball diamond is listen to Mia talk about the best way to look slutty. “Really good. Hot.”

Elise exhales, spouting a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke into the air. It’s already hazy. “Hot?” she says, voice teetering on laughter. “Oh my god Coley, don’t be such a pervert.”

Coley looks down, face flushing hot. She hasn’t spent that much time on her looks: some mascara and lip gloss, paired with a t-shirt and cutoffs. She doesn’t have anything slutty in her wardrobe, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if she did. The matrix of wanting to look available but not too available, be complimentary but not a pervert, is still beyond her.

“I asked,” Sonya points out, shooting Coley a smile. She gives the string a final, decisive pull. “Okay, let’s go.”

Mia and Elise both groan theatrically as they pull themselves up off the floor. Mia offers Coley a pull on the joint, which she declines with a shake of her head. She doesn’t want to soften the edges of the night, or risk saying something she’ll regret.

The boys who invited them out are all eighteen or older; some of them even have their own cars, or access to their parents’. Their leader, Trenton, swaggers through the halls every day like a peacock in bright Hawaiian shirts, practically demanding that everyone stop and take notice. His friends follow in his footsteps, sometimes bouncing off the lockers or swinging from the ceiling beams to show how cool they are, even though one of them’s been suspended three times this semester and another wears a ratty Rastafarian beanie everywhere he goes even though his parents are Swedish. They all watch Sonya everywhere she goes, especially Trenton. Coley thinks she might hate him.

Mia and Elise both squeal and clap their hands at the baseball game, cheering for their respective targets (Mason the delinquent in Mia’s case, Adrian and his beanie for Elise.) Sonya leans back on their blanket, balanced on her arms, looking bored. It’s a double act, Coley knows: she _is_ bored, but she shows it just enough to make the boys want to catch her attention, not enough to let them know that she genuinely isn’t interested. They make a show of how hard they can swing the bat, how loud the crack is, how they tackle each other and wrestle to keep the opposing player from reaching home base. They’re just a step away from flexing their muscles, Coley thinks. Afterwards, they saunter over to the blanket, and Trenton claims Sonya’s attention as his prize (he won the game, of course) while Mason and Adrian settle for Mia and Elise. There’s no fourth boy for Coley, and she’s happy about that, but she’s also deadly bored and annoyed watching the others flirt.

Sonya catches her eye. “Hey,” she says, “Trenton’s going to drive us into town to get bubble tea. Want to come?”

Coley shakes her head. “I’ll walk home.”

It’s a long walk from the baseball diamond back to her neighbourhood, and with every stabbing pain in her calves, Coley thinks about Trenton and his fancy car and his ugly shirts. She hopes he gets a flat tire. She hopes another car bumps into his and scrapes the paint off. Most of all, she hopes Sonya’s going to get home early, and text her, even though she knows she won’t.

* * *

Sometimes Coley climbs out of her bedroom window and lies on her room, watching the stars overhead and wondering why she feels so disconnected from the rest of her body. Is the Coley who lives in her brain the same Coley whose legs peddle her bike, whose fingers pick up a pencil to write in her diary, whose mouth opens and closes and chews on the asparagus her mother makes for dinner? Is the Coley who pictures herself behind the wheel of a fancy car with Sonya in the driver’s seat, driving past the nearest town and into the nearest city where no one knows them and they can do whatever they want the same Coley who doesn’t protest when Trenton says “hey, try to hit me” and then laughs when he pins her wrist in place? If the Coley who wakes from guilty dreams of bare skin and warm breasts under her hands is the same one who snaps at her mother when she asks when Coley’s going to find a boyfriend, why can’t she pick one feeling and stick with it?

It’s one of the things she used to envy Sonya for: how she never seems to feel ill at ease in her own skin, because her skin was so perfect, why would she? No one who looks like Sonya could possibly think that they don’t fit; she’s a Royal Doulton figurine while Coley is a dollar store vase that someone dropped on the floor and cracked.

She doesn’t think like that anymore. Not since the night after junior prom, when she and Sonya got tipsy on stolen wine and Sonya confessed that her aunt had once told her she needed plastic surgery. Not since she curled up next to Sonya on the couch and hugged her while she cried because her parents hadn’t called to wish her a happy birthday. Not since she’d helped Sonya make a bonfire of all the calculus tests she’d flunked so that no one in her family would find them. Even Royal Doulton figurines don’t look that happy, she thinks: there’s something pained about their painted faces.

So when Sonya texts her asking her to come to the drugstore with her to buy a pregnancy test (she’s not sure, she’s only three days late, but maybe the condom broke and they didn’t realize and she doesn’t want to ask Mia or Elise because they’d tell their boyfriends and she’s scared, _please_ ) she ignores the ugly drop in her stomach and says yes, of course. And she stares the clerk right in the eye, daring him to say something, and helps Sonya rip the packaging open, and holds her hand while they wait for the stick to change colour. Sonya cries when it’s negative, and Coley hugs her, pats her back, and says “you’re okay” because she knows it’s what Sonya needs to hear.

“It’s not that great,” Sonya says to her later, while they lie by the side of the pool in the fading afternoon light. She wrinkles her nose. “Sex, I mean. You just kind of lie there and wait for it to be over.”

Coley doesn’t say what she’s always heard, which is “maybe it just needs to be with the right partner,” because that sounds too much like jealousy and she has to be a better person than that. So instead she just says “you can always say no,” and thinks that even if she is partially saying it for selfish reasons, it’s still the right thing to say.

Sonya rolls over until she bumps into Coley, and presses her face against her shoulder. “You’re such a good friend,” she says, eyes serious. “You’re always there for me,” and there’s nothing for Coley to say except the truth: “Of course. I always will be.”

* * *

The night after the afternoon when everything changes, Coley lies awake for hours. She’s wiped off the concealer she put on to keep her mom from noticing her cuts, and her arms hurt from all the punching, and her lips hurt for a completely different reason. She’s been buzzing all over since it happened, leftover adrenaline with nowhere to go, and she’s not really sure what to do about it. She hasn’t even written in her diary: it feels like writing it down would ruin it somehow.

Her phone buzzes, light flashing blue, and when she picks it up she sees Sonya’s picture on the display screen. She swipes it, and sees a text: _look our ur window_.

She gets out of bed and looks. Sonya’s bike is lying by the curb, and she’s standing on the front lawn pointing a flashlight up at the window, her bright smile illuminated by the street light. She makes a “come here” gesture, and Coley sprints down the stairs, only pausing to grab her sneakers before she’s out the door. She’s always hugged Sonya when she sees her, so it seems completely natural to extend that, kissing her as they throw their arms around each other. Once she’s wondered if dating your best friend would be weird, if you wouldn’t know what to do without being awkward. She was wrong; it’s the easiest thing in the world.

“You could have just thrown pebbles,” she says when they finally break apart. Sonya’s smile grows even brighter. “There’s no gravel in your driveway,” she says. “Get your bike, I want to show you something.”

And of course she’d follow Sonya anywhere, so she retrieves her bike from the garage and off they go. She follows her across town and up the hill, and something warm breaks open inside her when she realizes where they’re going. There’s no streetlights at the baseball diamond, but Sonya’s flashlight is huge, and the moon is so big and golden, it doesn’t matter. They abandon their bikes at the edge, and Sonya takes Coley by the hand, pulling her over to the cliff’s edge where they sit, legs dangling over the edge.

“I remember you told me how great the view is at night,” Sonya says, “so I figured you’d like to come up here. On a date I mean.” She’s blushing faintly, and Coley realizes she’s _nervous_ : she’s never been the one to suggest things before, always agreeable but never the first foot forward.

“I love it,” she says, and Sonya’s face relaxes. “Thank you.” She leans in and kisses her again, still delighted by the novelty of it: that she can just _do_ that now whenever she wants, that it’s not an impulse she needs to bite back on or cover up. Sonya feels as good as she always thought she would, soft and warm and alive and vital.

“I’m gonna take you there,” Sonya says when they break the kiss, pointing down at the lights. “When I get my license. I’m taking the test in a few weeks, and then we won’t need to ask anyone for a ride. Where do you want to go first?”

Coley leans against Sonya. “I don’t know,” she says. “Anywhere. As long as you’re with me.”

And Sonya puts an arm around her, squeezes, and says what Coley knows she’s going to say: “Of course I’ll be.”


End file.
